Facebook is THE place to go to ensure people know about your business. Or at least that’s the hype. There are dozens of “Facebook Marketing Gurus” around and plenty of experts on tap to get you to sell your wares through Facebook advertising or pages or groups. And yes, there anecdotal cases of people who have achieved phenomenal success through Facebook.
But one swallow and summers and all that.
Actual data is more reliable than any number of anecdotes or experts and their case histories.
Face facts. Facebook achieves only around a 2% level of action. In other words, only two people in every 100 who see your activity on Facebook do anything as a result. That is much lower than the percentage of people who act on direct mail these days
Even if you look at the average engagement figures of Facebook – at 6% – this is woeful in comparison to either email or old fashioned direct mail.
The top company that engages the most on Facebook is Coca Cola. They are engaging with around 4.5m people using Facebook – but to achieve that they had to get 72m people following them in the first place.
On average, a Facebook page has around 5,000 likes. That’s well below one calculated minimum requirement of 100,000. Even then, you’d only get around 600 people to take action on anything you posted. As I said in an earlier blog post, Facebook marketing really only works for major, global brands. If you are not one of them, then Facebook is not a priority for your marketing.
Facebook is fantastic for relationships, keeping up-to-date with family and friends. But as a business marketing tool, it leaves a lot to be desired. If you are a small business, do not be egged-on by the hype and the enthusiasm of those gurus trying to sell you their ebooks and training courses on marketing with Facebook.
Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan via photopin cc
4 thoughts on “Facebook marketing is worse than old-fashioned mail”
I agree totally, I advertised on facebook for a month and never sold anything, I had a lot of likes etc but nothing that generated a single sale.
Thanks for the comment Mark. Your experience agrees with what I have seen myself and with many clients.
This echoes what I’ve been saying to accountants for some time.
Curiously though one of the most popular posts on my blog is titled: ‘Examples of good facebook pages for accountants’. In it I ask for examples of such pages that have proven their worth. In the two years since I wrote the post and despite it atracting tens of thousands of readers, NOT ONE example has yet been suggested….
Thanks Mark – that’s an excellent example backing up what I said. I know it is anecdotal and I criticised anecdotal evidence, but there seem to be more anecdotes about Facebook NOT helping business than there are those which suggest it does. There must be something in that…!
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